The command line interface is an alternate method of interacting with macOS and Mac OS X, relying on text based command entry to execute commands and perform tasks. It is accessed on the Mac by using the Terminal application. Generally, the command line is considered advanced, and thus it’s usage tends to be more complex than many standard procedures on a Mac.
Need to mount an SMB network share from the command line of MacOS? There are a few different approaches to mount SMB shares from the command line, and we’ll cover two different methods to mount network shares on the Mac using Terminal.
Ever wished you could instantly launch the Terminal app on Mac by keyboard shortcut? Instead of relying on Spotlight and typing Terminal and hitting return, which works great and has for many years, you can actually create your own custom keyboard shortcut to open the Terminal app on MacOS. This article will detail how you … Read More
HomeBrew, the command line package manager, has native support for macOS Ventura 13, so if you have recently updated to macOS Ventura or bought a new Mac with Ventura preinstalled, you’ll probably want to install Homebrew on the Mac running Ventura. Like most command line tools, HomeBrew is intended for advanced users that like to … Read More
Ever needed to take a full webpage scrolling screenshot on the Mac through the command line? While there are various approaches to taking full webpage screenshots on a Mac easily with Firefox or another browser, and many ways to take screenshots on the Mac, including taking screenshots from the Terminal, none of the native options … Read More
Mac users may need to occasionally clear out and flush DNS cache in MacOS, perhaps because they modified their hosts file, or for troubleshooting purposes. Resetting DNS cache on the Mac is generally only needed by advanced users, but even novice Mac users should find the process to be pretty easy, though it is achieved … Read More
Command line users may encounter situations where they’d like to open the Google Chrome web browser directly from the Terminal on the Mac.
Scheduling a Mac to boot, sleep, and shutdown, have been longstanding features in the Energy preference panel on Mac OS since the beginning of the operating system, so if you updated to macOS Ventura and now you’re wondering where those settings went, you aren’t alone. You can still schedule a Mac to turn on and … Read More
If you’re new to the Mac command line you may have come across a situation where you’re trying to interact with a file that has spaces in the name, for example “This File.txt” but as you probably discovered, you can’t simply type the file name if there are spaces within the file name, or the … Read More
Some Mac users have discovered that the hosts file in MacOS does not appear to work, or changes to the /etc/hosts file on the Mac are seemingly ignored. Given that the hosts file is used to map IP addresses to host names, and is frequently modified by advanced users, this is an understandably annoying problem. … Read More
Ever wanted to download all photos from iCloud Photos using the command line? Thanks to the third party icloud_photos_downloader tool, you can do just that. Called icloudpd for short, it works to access and download photos directly from iCloud using the command line on a Mac, Windows PC, or Linux.
All Macs have a bundled SSH server that is disabled by default, but can be turned on at any time if you’d like to grant remote command line access to a machine. The SSH server in MacOS is turned on by using a sharing feature called Remote Login. With Remote Login enabled, the Mac now … Read More
Want to SSH into your Mac, from your iPad? SSH is pretty easy to setup, so if you’d like to have Terminal access of an iMac from an iPad Pro, for example, you’ll be up working in no time at all.
Occasionally, Mac users may notice that icons in the Finder of MacOS or the Dock of MacOS either display as generic icons, or the icons do not align with what they should (for example, seeing a generic document icon instead of a PDF thumbnail, or seeing a VLC icon instead of a zip archive icon, … Read More
SHA512 hashes are often used to determine data integrity, whether for matching a downloaded file to an original on a server, or for command output, or to make sure a file transfer was successful, or not tampered with. Checking a SHA512 hash is pretty easy on a Mac, thanks to bundled command line tools that … Read More
Ready to automate Mac app downloads and installs? If you’re setting up a new Mac, you probably know how tedious it is to manually navigate to a bunch of different developer websites, and to individually download and install all the Mac apps you may want. This is a necessary but time consuming procedure for setting … Read More
Are you noticing blurry text on your Mac’s display while navigating through the menu and across apps? More specifically, has this been an issue ever since you updated to macOS Monterey or Big Sur, and on a non-retina display? If so, chances are, font smoothing is enabled by default, and for some users they feel … Read More
If you are a Mac laptop user and you spend a lot of time at the command line, you may appreciate knowing that you can enable Low Power Mode on a Mac laptop through a terminal command. Enabling Low Power Mode through the command line on a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and MacBook is the … Read More
If you have attempted to use nano at the command line on MacOS recently, you may have noticed that the pico text editor is launched instead, via a symlink for /usr/bin/nano to pico. This is because the latest versions of MacOS remove the nano text editor from the command line for whatever reason, and instead … Read More
